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With a new CEO on board in the form of banking industry veteran Jeff Carter, Azigo Inc. is ready to move its online identification security tech forward.
The Cambridge company is banking on the fact that people will take to its idea of having a virtual wallet full of “Information Cards” — virtual versions of the real cards in our real wallets, such as credit cards or store loyalty cards — to make Internet shopping easier and more secure.
The easier part comes from not having to remember a slew of passwords — enter it once on the I-Card for, say Amazon.com, and the next time you visit Amazon the virtual card securely passes your login information to the site.
The secure part comes from the fact that people no longer will have to keep a written record of their passwords laying in a drawer somewhere, and because the passing of the login info from card to site happens securely each time, said Carter.
But the way the company plans to make money is through its service to businesses that already use something like loyalty cards.
For example, AAA is one of Azigo’s earliest clients, and it offers its members discounts on purchases of such things as hotel stays and travel. If you have a AAA I-Card in your Azigo virtual wallet, you can opt in to Azigo’s RemindMe service. By using a small, downloadable piece of software, RemindMe will place a AAA logo next to any search result you get for, say, a hotel, that shows that AAA offers a discount at that hotel.
“It’s all user-driven — it’s all very personal-based, and it puts the user of this software in control,” Carter said.
Azigo, formerly known as Parity Communications Inc., was founded in 2003. Co-founder and CTO Paul Trevithick had previously co-founded the Higgins Project, which helped establish — along with corporate partners such as IBM Corp., Google Inc., Novell Inc. and others — the open source framework for secure online identification. Trevithick also founded the Information Card Foundation with the support of those corporate giants. That group’s concepts are the basis of Azigo’s tech.
Before coming to Azigo, Carter was a founder of the Center for Future Banking, which he describes as “a visionary research center at MIT Media Lab, between MIT and Bank of America.”
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